The Telco industry is in constant evolution. The current hot topics include further advancements on LTE performance, the massification of IoT, the preparation for the first 5G commercial deployments and the digitalization of the Telco business. To support this scenario, technologies like NFV (Network Function Virtualization) have been key to build the foundation to fulfill the new performance, scalability and agility requirements. However, the performance offered by traditional cloud and data center architectures is notoriously not enough to support the needs of NFV workloads, forcing the Telco industry to find new ways to further optimized its cloud infrastructure.

The applications usually hosted on IT data centers are also evolving, with some having similar requirements to the ones we see in Telco. With the popularization of ultra-high definition video, virtual-reality, augmented-reality gaming and others, the consumer and enterprise workloads are evolving to require better performance and lower latency, making the development of a more efficient cloud infrastructure an imperative across multiple domains.

The Nokia AirFrame data center solution is designed with these requirements in mind, focusing on efficiently delivering extreme performance for the most demanding workloads. Nokia leverages its long history of excellence in hardware and software development, combined with an active collaboration with industry partners and the open source community, to develop a data center solution that delivers on the needs the today’s and future data centers. And now, the new Intel® Xeon® Scalable processor family is set to bring even higher performance and enhanced capabilities to the Nokia AirFrame servers.

Nokia uses Intel Xeon Scalable processors in the latest release of its AirFrame data center portfolio, which can run any cloud-based application, outperforming traditional IT servers to meet demands for low latency, high throughput and supreme reliability. AirFrame is available as rack-mounted hardware or as Open Compute Project (OCP) based servers, and may optionally incorporate accelerator cards for general purpose and for Telco-specific workloads.

Nokia has worked closely with Intel over the past year during the Intel Xeon Scalable processor development process and has just completed its own benchmarking of the new design. The results show substantial performance improvement over the previous generation Intel® Xeon® processor E5-26xxv4 , with an average gain of 40% in processor rate performance . Some of the attributes of the new processor and platform help explain such results:

Core Performance: Up to 28 cores delivering high performance and scalability for compute-intensive workloads across compute, storage and network usages

As a result, AirFrame servers running with the new processors will deliver more capacity and better throughput, enabling more virtual machines to run in the same amount of space with similar power consumption as before. Such efficiency gains allow Nokia customers to efficiently build capacity to support customer growth and deploy new services, ultimately boosting their business results.